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[klimp42]

Final Fantasy 8: An Amazing Story Hidden Behind Weird Mechanics

So it should be said that there is one thing that I love and that is some good narrative in gaming. I love it, give me a game with a good narrative and at least decent gameplay and I am in there, and a good narrative doesn't mean oscar level writing because I love Deadly Premonition, a notoriously weird game, but a golden game in my heart. Its story is weird and unique and at times outright strange, but it's endearing and I love how wild the story gets as it goes on. Now why am I talking about this? Why it's because of my lovely new bad gameplay good narrative obsession, Final Fantasy 8. That's right, gamer boys and girls we are going back to another old game, and that's because I just played it, and the remastered just got announced at E3 this year.

Alright so if you know nothing about the Final Fantasy series, let alone the 8th installment, let me help you out. Final Fantasy is an old franchise, it started in 1987 and got its name because the original name Fighting Fantasy was taken by a board game in the states, the myth of it being called Final Fantasy because it was a last ditch effort to make a successful game is just that, a myth. The game is prolific, being one of the granddaddy's of the JRPG genre and helping bring that good ol fashion turn based combat system popular in tabletop games like Dungeons and Dragons (D&D)  to videogames. Final Fantasy 1 is a classic of gaming and also is kind of like D&D, you have classes similar to the previously mentioned board game; Warrior, Monk, Thief, Paladin; with a few of its own unique classes; Red mage, Black mage and White mage. The games story was very simple, worlds ending, killing these fiends and go back in time and stop Chaos from doing this over again, also at some point the game explains that you are from another universe and that's why you just start outside the beginning kingdom, Final Fantasy stories like to be a little wild at times.

Like D&D you gained levels in this game by fighting monsters, getting stronger with each fight and eventually being strong enough to be able to face the final boss on even grounds, or maybe a little above them if you grind out yourself to max level. This system, if you are into the RPG genre, is incredibly rewarding as you get to see your team of lowly nothings evolve into masters of combat who can slay gods. The best part, to me at least, is going back to the starting area or an area that gave you trouble and stomping on those monsters who thought they were so cool 20 levels ago. Now in Final Fantasy series this system is in most of them, fight monsters, get exp, level up and your stats go up with it, the special cases are Final Fantasy 2,6,8 and 10, and of these the worst offenders of weird leveling are 2, 6 and 8. That's right, I said it, 6 has a weird leveling system with level not raising stats and needing summons equipped to level stats, I personally don't believe that it deserves its spot as one of the best Final Fantasys but that is an article for another time. I could explain why each is weird and 10 is fun and different in a good way, but forget all that and let's get into the focus of this piece, Final Fantasy 8.

Now even though it is my new obsession in good story bad gameplay, my fascination for this game goes way back to when I was a 3 year old with a pizza hut demo disc. Yeah you bet that was a thing, you would order a large pizza and it would come with a playstation demo disc that had a couple of games, but the only one that mattered to little old me was the demo for Final Fantasy 8, or that game with the guy with the cool sword and big water snake, as I was 3 and couldn't read that well. Seriously, if you have played a Final Fantasy game before you would know that you can use summons by clicking the tab they are in and then selecting the one you want, well ol kid me thought it was random as I was just picking things at random. So what I am saying is, I have always had a special place for this game in my heart, so there might be a bit of bias.

So I spent some time flip flopping over what I wanted to discuss and explain first, story or gameplay, on the one hand I wanted you to know what FF8 had to offer narratively, but on the other hand I feel I should let you guys know what you're getting into when you play this. So I decided to compliment sandwich this one, but like a subway compliment sandwich where the teenager who doesn't really want to work there barely tries to cut your bread so the top part is like really thin. So thin that what I am going to give you is this, FF8 is a great story of a young man learning to overcome his own weaknesses to understand that strength can be found in companions, listen I know that sounds cliche but I need more space to talk about the amazing character development and got to tell you about this bad gameplay.

So remember when I said that old Final Fantasy's had a nice leveling system based on fighting enemies, getting exp and raising stats? Throw it all out the window, because like I told you earlier FF8 is one of the weird ones. So for some reason FF8 has a whole system based around equipping "Guardian Forces" (summons) and then through this unlocking the ability to junction (equip) magic to your stats; like strength, magic, hp and the other classics; while also being able to junction magic to element and status attack and defense, allowing you to be able to either protect or do damage based on said elements and statuses. Now you might be thinking how does this work, because magic is usually used based on magic points (mp) well there is no mp in FF8. This is due to the narrative stating that it is very rare for people to do raw magic instead they need to draw magic from nature and creatures/people and use it that way. This means that in FF8 magic is a finite resource and instead of regaining mp you have to spend time drawing magic that is randomized to be either 2 or 12 magic, so it can take awhile. If this sounds a bit weird and confusing, don't worry it kind of is, there are tutorials to explain it, but man is it a weird system. So why is this all necessary? Well unlike other Final Fantasy's, in FF8 leveling raises your stats by the littlest amount, so to be able to do decent damage and also defend against it you need to junction magic. Also to make things even worse, leveling can be a problem as monsters level with you, so if an enemy is tough for you at level 20, raising your level to 30 won't help you as they will be doing more damage and have more health. The game does try to offset this by making it so if an enemy had fire to be drawn at lvl 10, at lvl 30 they would have fira to be drawn, which would make it so that you can junction a more powerful magic and do more damage. FF8 also gives you the option to just cast magic instead of drawing it from enemies, and can be useful since most bosses have healing magic to draw from them meaning you can go in without a huge stock of cure's.

Alright so we have a confusing system with a bad mechanic of monsters getting stronger with you as you level, is that all that is weird? Nope. So remember the guardian forces I mentioned earlier? Well they are necessary to be able to junction spells to stats and make your party stronger, but there are a limited number of them and that usually means only three of the six party members will have guardian forces so you can make a decent party for fighting. The problem is that the game likes to switch around who is playable a lot, and while it is fun and interesting in the narrative, it sucks gameplay wise. The game does make it easy by letting you be able to switch who has what guardian forces in a menu, but it gets tedious after the 15th time you have to do it and especially when the game switches between two perspectives like 4 times in 30 minutes. Also sometimes you have dream sequences where you play as another team and when you come back to your main party everyone but Squall, the main character, has everything unequipped, so you have to go back and re-junction everything and it's just a waste of time. Listen I could keep going on the weird aspects of this game, but I don't want it to take up this whole article and we got cool card games to talk about.

FF8 does a lot of things in a weird and bad way, but that doesn't mean it doesn't do things really really right, and thats with Triple Triad baby! Triple Triad is the super fun card game that exist within FF8, a game so good that you can also play it in FF14. The game is easy to get into and can get pretty hard with each area of the game map have unique rules, yet you can game the system by going to areas and abolishing rules and bring rules from other regions to new regions. Well except for one region, it is the king of rules, no exceptions! The fun of this game is not just showing the npc's of FF8 why you are the Yugi Muto of Triple Triad, you see you can learn an ability to turn cards you win from Triple Triad into items, which in turn can be turned into spells, powerful spells, I'm talking spells you are not meant to gain until like lvl 45 or 50. This means that if you want to you can spend time in the starting area at lvl 7 and leave a powerhouse that level thanks to Triple Triad. But there is a problem, this method is not quick, it takes hours to do this and also to even be able to get the ability to do this you will need to get AP for your Guardian Forces, which means either fighting fights normally or carding enemies which kills them but doesn' give exp, it can only be done at low health so be careful not to accidentally kill them.

So I have given a decent way to have fun but let me give you guys, in my opinion, the best way to enjoy FF8's gameplay, cheats. That's right a game that's so weird that the PC port has cheats that you can add to your save. I'm not talking about the normal ones we saw when FF7 and FF9 were ported to modern consoles, like the ability to turn off encounters and have it so you don't lose health in combat and do max 9999 damage. I am talking about the ability to modify a save file so you start with most low and mid level magic at full stock on all characters, and let me tell you it is a blessing. On PC it also allows you to at anytime raise all magic stocks to 100 and max level Guardian Forces, and let me tell you guys if you don't have the patience for the grind or want to try and just enjoy the story I highly suggest using these cheats, it makes things so much easier and I hope that the FF8 port coming to console has these cheats too. Also I should let you guys know I didn't immediately use these cheats, I tried to play it legit about three different times and every time the grind burnt me out, honestly if it wasn't for these cheats I would never had enjoyed FF8's amazing story. Speaking of amazing stories, let's finish off this subway compliment sandwich and talk about the good stuff.

So let me give you guys the easy lore of this world, on this planet, there are two types of people, normal people and sorceress, sorceresses can use magic naturally and a lot of them use this power for world domination especially the last sorceress, Adel, who was in charge of the country of Esthar and almost succeeded, due to this the Gardens were created by a man named Cid with the sole purpose to be able to kill sorceress should one like Adel show up again. The thing is one will show up and I don't mean because of plots need for a main antagonist, I mean because a sorceress can not die until she passes her powers to another female. Our story follows the character of Squall Lionheart, a quiet and distant youth who wants nothing more than to be able to prove that he is strong enough to be on his own, so badly that he actively shuts out other people who try to get close to him. Our boy here is a SeeD candidate in Balamb Garden, which means he is close to graduating and being basically a mercenary for the Garden until the need to fight a Sorceress arrives. And from there that's how the story grows, you have a cast of characters that join over time each interesting in their own right, helping as you deal with a looming sorceresses threat. Sounds pretty standard right? Well let's be real even something standard can be handled masterfully and that is exactly what FF8 does. Before I get into that there are two more characters I need to talk about. Laguna Loire, a soldier of the Galbadian army, who Squall keeps having vivid dreams about, through these dreams you see piece by piece of what he went through and how these events shaped him and the world around him and also how he is connected to Squall. There is also Rinoa Heartilly, a young girl who wishes to free the city of Timber from Galabadian control and in the process acts as the catalyst to what motivates Squall to change, all do to a chance meeting. When you look at the plot of FF8 it is abit generic what with stopping a Sorceress from creating her perfect utopia and most characters, outside of the ones mentioned above, get little depth to them, but what makes this story so engaging and interesting is Squall.

You see Squall starts off as a character who I can say I was disappointed in and didn't really like, a character I had adored since I was a kid due to my memories with that demo. He is angsty, off putting and really annoying, hell it feels like half of Squalls Dialogue is "...", but the thing is, that's the point. Squall is like that because he is afraid of trusting people again, fearing that if he does he will get hurt again and abandoned like he was as a child, so he puts on this cold front to make it easier for him, he doesn't have to worry if people like and rely on him if he is cold and indifferent, they would all just hate him. It is through this premise and his chance meeting with Rinoa that we see how Squall grows and changes, a man who I started off hating and grew to love and it's because it feels natural. Squall isn't cold because he thinks its cool or because he knows he is better than everyone else, he is a kid, a sad kid who went through heartbreak way to young and is afraid to love someone again. He is thrust into a dangerous world and has to come to terms that his lifestyle will not work for him, that he needs and wants to rely on others and he can't just keep ignoring a part of himself. Through the course of FF8 you see a quiet kid with a broken heart, overcome himself and become a real hero and use his new strength to make sure he can protect those close to him as well as himself.

And now we reach a bit of a problem, I would love to explain more, I want to explain why certain scenes moved me so much and why Squall's journey brought me to tears, but then I would need to spoil parts of the story, and that is the last thing I want to do. This is a Final Fantasy story that has incredible character development and I want people to be able to experience it themselves, to see what makes it great. I should also at least mention that the story is not without faults and tropes with Rinoa starting off being your typical manic pixie dream girl and if Squall really wanted to be alone he would have left SeeD after completing his training, and of course the other characters are not given as much screen time as Squall and Rinoa. However, tropes are not always bad and can still have depth, and by the end of the story I would say that Rinoa sheds the trope but it is on the nose in the beginning.

I left a lot of stuff out and with the HD remaster coming out sometime this year I think that if this article intrigued you, pick up a copy and experience it yourself. Experience a masterpiece of character growth that I believe is held back by clunky gameplay choices. I sincerely hope if you do decide to pick up this title that you enjoy Squall's story as much as I did.

#final fantasy #final fantasy viii #final fantasy 8 #final fantasy 8 hd #final fantasy 8 remaster #squall #squall leonhart #rinoa #rinoa heartilly #laguna #laguna loire #article #look at at #discussion

[klimp42]

Devil May Cry V Review: A Pizza Style Boys End

Well after 11 long years here we are, a sequel to probably one of my favorite franchise in history, Devil May Cry V and what a fantastic sequel it is. Now unlike my last review, the iron for this one is still warm. I know it's been a month but hear me out here, I want to be able to spoil some stuff and not feel to bad since, hey its been a month since the game came out, but if you still haven’t played DMCV then watch out we got some spoilers up ahead.

Alright so before we go into talking about all the things this game did right and wrong, I should probably give some backstory to this almost 20 year old franchise whose last canon game came out 11 years ago, I know another “DMC” came out since then but we don’t talk about DMC Devil May Cry. So Devil May Cry for those who don’t know is the story of one of the sons of the legendary Dark Knight Sparda, whose Sparda? The biggest baddest demon who decided that demons being dicks on Earth isn’t cool, betrayed his kind and fight them back to hell and sealed them in it using his amazing power. For the next 2000 years, he acted as Earth’s guardian and then eventually he met either the most smoking hot or most powerful or both, girl ever named Eva. He married her and had twin sons named Dante and Vergil. Now demons aren't a big fan of Sparda because of the whole betrayal and locking them into hell thing, and no one hates him more then his old boss, the demon king Mundus. So one day Sparda dies, don’t ask how its never been fully explained he just died, and Mundus sees this as the perfect opportunity for some revenge and sends a bunch of demons to kill Sparda’s family, but those demons suck and only succeeded in killing Eva.

So after all that and to speed this up to talking about the actual game, Dante and Vergil leave their destroyed home and go about following two paths, Vergil stylishly lusting for power and Dante being a stylish gun for hire, and eventually a demon hunter. Backstory aside all you really need to remember is style means everything, Sparda was the coolest, Dante and Vergil have two different ideas on how to live life.

Alright so moving on to DMCV, let's finally talk about what I feel is a perfect end to the story of Dante and Vergil. DMCV takes place about ten years after the events of DMC4 and involves Dante getting a job by mysterious new guy going by “V”, V wants Dante to go kick the ass of this new demon named Urizen who is causing all sorts of havoc in Red Grave City, where he has raised this giant demonic plant called a Qliphoth which if it isn’t stopped will lead to the end of the world. So Dante, his friends Lady and Trish, go to Red Grave City, into the Qliphoth to stop Urizen, but he starts taking a long time so V gets nervous and decides to go pick up Nero, one of the main characters of DMC4, who just a few days ago had gotten his arm ripped off, it was a demonic one that had Vergil’s sword in it. I know that sounds insane, but if I explained everything in this game series we would be here for a forty more pages, so let's just move on, things are crazy and V tells Nero that the demon who took his arm is Urizen and the Dante needs his help. Fast forward a few hours, Dante is losing his fight to Urizen, Trish and lady are knocked out, V can’t do shit since all he can do is hobble on his cane and let his demon buddies do his work for him, so Nero tries to help and also doesn’t question why this demon looks nothing like the human shaped figure that took his arm, he loses, Dante loses and things go south really fast. In the end, Nero leaves to train for a month to try and actually beat Urizen, V stays behind to try and slow down the Qliphoth’s spread and Dante is assumed to be dead.

Well now that all that back story has been dealt with, let's move on to gameplay, setting and the fantastic soundtrack. So while not being the first DMC game that you can play more than one character, it is the first base release game that you play as multiply characters, Nero, V and Dante, who spoilers is still totally fine and alive. Each character plays completely differently, making it so that depending on who you are playing in the level offers a completely different experience. Nero controls similar to his DMC 4 counterpart, he has the Red Queen that can be revved up to do longer and fire infused attacks, he also has his Blue Rose which can be charged to do explosive shot. The difference of DMC V Nero and DMC4 Nero, is that he no longer has his Devil Bringer, his arm that was taken, instead he has a bunch of different prosthetics he can call upon called Devil Breakers, offering different abilities like a big electric hand, a rocket fist, the ability to stop time, one that lets you go wild with big crazy attacks and a few others. Other than that, he has the same combos and movement and if you liked playing as Nero in DMC4 you’ll love it here, especially after you beat the game which is the only thing I won’t fully spoil, just know you can do some cool stuff.

Now if I was to do this right, I would start talking about V, but I want to keep the speed of similar characters going so let's talking about the pizza loving devil hunter Dante. Like Nero, Dante is very similar to his DMC4 counterpart, honestly his is the exact same if it wasn’t for the fact his sword changes three times and he gets Sin Devil Trigger. I know you might he saying why spoil this and not Nero, well this was in the trailers and Nero’s thing wasn’t. Seriously it's the same bread and butter Dante had in DMC4, you can switch between his four styles of Trickster, a dashing and teleporting style, Swordmaster, a style that increase the moveset of your devil arms, Gunslinger, a style that lets you do crazy gun tricks, and Royal Guard, a hard style to master but it lets you guard attacks and turn them back on your enemies. He has his main sword Rebellion, which becomes his main sword Devil Sword Dante, he has his guns Ebony and Ivory and Coyote-A and gains more throughout the course of the story as he beats bosses. You have your devil trigger that lets you regain health and do more damage, and through the story you get Sin Devil Trigger that lets you do insane damage but you cannot heal. Listen, if you like Dante and like playing as him, you will love him in this, he controls well and its stylish as hell.

Alright so it's time for the boy I skipped, V, and the reason for that is because he is the newest character and controls completely different from every other DMC character you have been able to play as. V doesn’t actually fight, he kills demons, but he does not fight, his boys Griffin, Shadow and Nightmare fight for him, demon summons who share appearances and names with enemies from the first Devil May Cry. As V you just stand back and let your demons fight for you and when they drop the enemies health you rush in and kill them with you cane. It is this exact gameplay that has people split, unlike Dante and Nero, you are not in the action, you are off in the distance hitting buttons for combos that you don’t have full control for. Personally, I feel that once you get more used to it that it's not so bad, you have certain moves that allow you to keep control of where Griffin and Shadow are and if things get to hectic or those bastards just won’t listen to you you can spend devil trigger to make them to increase damage and fight by themselves. You also can use devil trigger to summon Nightmare and have him just fall onto the battlefield and fuck things up for you and you can also get an ability that lets you jump up and control him. So while V is the most hands off character and some people are not fans of that, I love and will always protect my hands off emo son.

The last few things to talk about in DMCV, like always style is a factor in fights and the more varied and different your attacks are leads to higher style points and taunting the enemies gives you a ton of style points, which while before was just so you felt cool, with the games new multiplayer elements in which in certain missions you play alongside other players, now other people can know if you are super cool. However unlike previous DMC games, there are no items to be used, no holy waters or stars to heal you or refill your devil trigger meter, however to balance this enemies drop more orbs that fulfil this function and you can find orb packs to break that heal you or refill your devil trigger.

The setting of this game is much less varied compared to previous canon title DMC4, which I feel is better for it, since you have a coherent theme to the whole story. Your setting is the streets, buildings and sewers of Red Grave City, the destroyed areas around the Qliphoth,and the inside of the Qliphoth itself. Personally, I feel like this gives the game a more end of the world feel, as you see drained corpses of the people of Red Grave City and places that looked lived in just a month ago, I know that other DMC games have let you go through cities, but in those the cities where always just abandoned since they couldn’t really have a bunch of corpses on screen while you were styling on demons.

Alright so one of the things I couldn’t wait to talk about, the soundtrack, which is just great. Listen, if you like any of the other DMC soundtracks you will love this game and if you like rock and roll you will love this games soundtrack. Hell, even if you don’t like rock after a while of playing this game you will grow to love it. The soundtrack is also tied to you style meter so as you do better the song gets better while you are fighting by adding more bass, chorus, and increasing the volume, all building up to a full song to match how cool you look as you dodge, taunt and style on these demons. To get a taste of what it will be like when you go full style god,  lookup Devil Trigger, Crimson Cloud and Subhuman, those three songs play while you kick ass as Nero, Dante and V and makes you feel so bad ass when you are taunting and beating down demons. Also the songs during the boss fights are also amazing, seriously the way that DMC incorporates music as you fight is masterful and makes you seem cool as hell.

Now I know I have been singing this games praises, but it is not perfect, its close though damn close. One big detractor that might affect you is the voice acting, it’s great sometimes and others it is just a little of sync to what the character is saying and the story, while great, does have a few moments that are weird like how because Nero says quit it, Dante and a newly refreshed Vergil go alright and stop their fight to the death and instead decide to jump into hell and stop and kill the Qliphoth.

So yeah those are my only complaints, I said it was close to perfect and I mean it. This game is the Devil May Cry that we have deserved since DMC4, it controls well, looks beautiful and gives a final send-off to Dante and Vergil, leaving the stage for future games to focus on Nero and Nico and even new casts of characters. Honestly if you enjoyed old DMC games, even DMC Devil May Cry, pick this game up as you need to play it. If you have never played a DMC game before, play the free demo and see if its your speed and if it is, then dive on it and be the stylish demon hunter you were meant to be.

#game review #game recap #devil may cry #devil may cry v #capcom #dmc5 #dmcv #dmc5 spoilers #dmc5 v #dmc dante #dmc nero

[klimp42]

Metroid (NES) Retrospective: A Look Back on a Classic

So with Tumblr deciding that naughty bits are no longer allowed on their site, let's look back at one of the first sexy ladies for huge nerds and degenerates, Samus Aran! Bet you thought I was going to talk about Lara Croft, no we are going back to the oldest of schools, with a lady that most people probably didn’t know was a lady when they first played it in ‘86.

    Alright, now I know it might be weird to talk about a review and retrospective in a game that is not only 30+ years old, but has been made non-canon in the Metroid story with the remake Metroid Zero Mission being a thing, but trust me I have reasons for wanting to review this. The first reason is that a friend of mine gave me a NES Classic as a Christmas gift, second I am a huge fan of Metroid and have always wanted to play the original, and third I thought up that opening line and thought it would be funny, I know its okay at best, but shut up. So for this little retro review, I am going to break this down into three categories, story, gameplay and legacy.

    When it comes to the story of Metroid, it has the same level of complexity to the story as any other NES game from the time, if you just play the game and don’t bother to look into the booklet, its a game about a person going around shooting things and doing flips and then they fight a thing in a jar and escape from a timed bomb. Yet, like a lot of games from the time, the way to get the story was to read, as there simply wasn’t enough space on the cartridges to have a bunch of text and images next to a game of this magnitude at this stage of the consoles life (I say that because games like Castlevania III eventually did just this only 3 years later). So lets break down this galactic tale of a bounty hunter fighting life-sucking aliens and a supercomputer that controls them.

In the far-flung year of 2000, all of the planets came together to make the Galactic Federation, and things were good till a bunch of dick aliens decided to be Pirates of The Carribean in Space and just cause all kinds of space problems. The space 5-0 were super bad at there job so the Galactic Federation created Space Hunters, who were way better at stopping Space Johnny Depp. So while all of these things are happening the space cops find a small egg of an unknown life form on the planet SR388 (which is actually super important and is the location of the 2nd game), and it is believed for no reason other than plot that this small egg probably is the reason the civilization on SR388 was destroyed. So the spacops and the galactic boys decide that this should be brought in for studies, but Captain Hook in space decide it would be pretty dope to have something that might have destroyed a whole civilization, so they can have a biological weapon to rip apart the galaxy, yeah jokey names aside the space pirates are actually really evil for the sake of being evil. So the spirates run off to their main hideout on the planet Zebes and the Galactic Federations men can’t get in so they call on their better fighters, the space hunters, well specifically Samus Aran, a cyborg who strikes fear in the space pirates and is a “man” with a mystery, that mystery being that he has no wangus and is a woman.

Well the only thing left for the story is what I already said, Samus enters the planet Zebes and has to go kick the brainy ass of Mother Brain and destroy any Metroids she finds, what was inside the small egg thing found on planet SR388, that have been awakened and multiplied by the pirates in space. So let's move onto the gameplay of Metroid, which is simple when you look at just the base controls. You can run, jump, and shoot a short distance at enemies with the ability to eventually be able to swap with the select button between rockets and normal energy shots. Yet this game led to the creation of an all-new gameplay style of side-scrolling and backtracking over huge areas, which sounds like a whatever concept, but it is honestly really fun...for some reason, that genre being Metroidvania, the vania coming from the Castlevania franchise. I am simplifying it, honestly, you have tight controls and upgrades to your arsenal as you play, things like the Varia suit to lower the amount of damage that you take, long shot and Ice beam to shoot your shots farther and freeze enemies in place. You also have upgrades that change gameplay like the morph ball (or the Maur Mari as its called in this for some reason) which morphs you into a ball that can get into small places and the ability to drop bombs in that ball form, the high jump that makes you do just that, and the screw attack that is used to say I would like to not shoot things that aren't bosses or Metroids anymore. Seriously the screw attack, like it is in most Metroid games, is just so good, just jump and kill everything.

Alright, so controls is one bit but what about the actual game, so it is interesting, especially being in a unique location like planet Zebes, the music is a bop, just a straight heater of a soundtrack, and the fun of hidden blocks and rooms that let you get the feeling that you are exploring through a labyrinthian planet. However, problems do show up really quickly, first thing being when you start a game you only have 30 health, alright that's tough but okay the first area's enemies in the corridor before Brinstar don’t hit to hard so it isn’t too bad. But then you find you first Energy tank which fully heals you and adds a pip to your health, so now instead of a cap of 99 health, you have 198 health, sick!. So you keep playing, maybe you go to far and hit were Ridley is, one of the bosses and poster boys for the franchise, shit you died, so you’re sent back to the start of Ridley’s area and what’s this? Your health is back at 30, which sucks but also you need to now hit a cap of 198 instead of 99! Though this becomes less of an issue as you get more E tanks, but man does it suck in the beginning to just be like oh cool this sucks. Like I get it, this is NES hard, enemies are bullshit on purpose to hide the fact that you can beat this game in less than an hour if you know what you are doing. Speaking of enemies, damn do they look super cool or super dumb, with the top of the spectrum being the Metroids themselves or Mother Brain, and the bottom being the weird ball things in Ridley’s place, Ridley himself, or those damn Cheerios ( just google Metroid cheerios if you don’t know what I’m talking about). The enemies in this game range from slowly moving annoyance to this homing at me bullshit is getting on my last nerve, so expect to take alot of hits from both of them.

Traversing around the game is alot of fun and it feels greet, but there is a little bit of a problem if you want to play this game now, see in the 80’s you had this like outline of where you where going, an idea of what to expect in the next area, cool right? Well that was in the booklet you got when you bought the game, no such thing in the NES classic or on the Switch’s NES collection. So unless you have a damn good memory you are probably going to want to pull up a map that you can use for your first time, or you might get lost, or maybe you are way better at the whole keeping track of yourself then I am and you don’t need a map.

Now, what is a game without boss fights right? So let's talk about some of, and by some I mean the three total boss fights in the game. For this let's go in order of easiest to hardest to get to, in my opinion, so Kraid, Ridley and then Mother Brain. So Kraid in this game is way smaller than he is from every other time he has, or I guess, will show up in Metroid titles, he is about the size of Samus and also from some reason there is a second one of him in his lair. His attack is what it is for all of his games, he shoots spikes from his chest and throws energy talon things, you just have to hit him to damage him, but it's difficult because he has the whole chest spike things blocking your shoots so you have to let him shoot and then land some hits. Ridley is only like his future self because he can shoot fire out of his mouth, but that's it and sometimes he will only shoot in a huge arc so you just close the distance and this boy is easy as hell to put down. The final boss of the game is Mother Brain and good god is she hard to just take down, one getting to her is the world’s biggest chore, and there is so many cheerios hitting you that trying to shoot missiles into that small window to attack her just sucks, and to get to her you have yo take down this glass tubes that regain health as you dont damage them, so you either get through really quickly, or it takes a thousand years. Also make sure you don’t in the last fight because it is back to the start of Tourian with 30 health, yay. Listen, the game has some hard fights when it comes to the bosses, except for Ridley, but it is still enjoyable to beat them and if you take the time to learn the fights it is actually really easy to exploit them, like Ridley.

Okay, so you beat Mother Brain and the only thing left to do is run to the surface of Zebes to escape it before it explodes, you do it and if you beat the game in less than 5 hours, you get to see the biggest twist in gaming, Samus is a girl! And if you beat the game in less than 3 hours you get to see her in her famous Zero Suit, and if you do it in less than an hour you get to see her in Bikini, a reward for only the most experienced gamer boys and girls! This game is rough, it's clear to see where the love of the game came from, it was unique for the time and it shows, the Metroid franchise has grown and improved with each entry, except for Other M, and was one of the reasons that the Metroidvania genre even exists.

So would I recommend playing this game? If you like classic NES games then yeah I would recommend it and if you have a Switch and just want to play the ending of the game there is a special version that starts you with all upgrades at the fight with Ridley. Also if you are a fan who has never played this game before, I would say that you should give the grandfather of the franchise a try. Now if you don’t really like old NES games or you just want to see the story of the first game, I would recommend just playing Metroid Zero Mission, it’s a complete remake of the first game with better controls and it's much easier, and if you enjoy it you could go from there to the original Metroid, or just play the franchise from there!

#metroid #nes #review #retrospective #gaming #samus aran #ridley metroid #classic #retro #switch